Campaigners in Chester met city MP Chris Matheson to urge him to take action to end poverty, tackle inequality and fight climate change.

Linda Shuttleworth and Richard Day are part of the action/2015 global campaign, which is one of the largest and most diverse coalitions ever established, and spans over 125 countries through more than 1,200 organisations.

In the UK, action/2015 is supported by VSO (Voluntary Service overseas) alongside other well known development agencies.

The group is urging the Prime Minister to attend two major global summits in coming months-the UN General Assembly in New York in September and the Climate Change Summit in Paris in December.

These summits come at a time when one seventh of the world’s population live on less than $1.25 a day, when the poorest half of the global population own less than 1% of total wealth while the richest 1% owns nearly 50% of global wealth.

Linda said: “British people have always been at the forefront of saving lives through development, from the Make Poverty History campaign in 2005 to Parliament passing into law the UK’s commitment to spending 0.7% of our national income on tackling global poverty earlier this year.

“We want to continue this success and that is why we met with our new MP to ask him to help us continue Britain’s leading role in international development. We had a really positive conversation with Chris Matheson, who said that as well as being a moral issue, international development is in everyone’s interests.’